The Conservatives will unveil their employment insurance reforms this week, in a move that will prove to be a huge disappointment to the opposition parties.

The Liberals and NDP have been salivating at the prospect of EI changes that will force doctors to flip burgers and Maritime fishermen to go west, or risk losing their benefits.

The reality will be more modest and grounded in common sense. Regular EI recipients will be expected to commute up to an hour to take a job and will have to accept work that pays 70% of their average income.

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But these are reasonable changes, designed to remove disincentives to work. At the moment, jobs that pay less or offer “less favourable” conditions can be turned down, without risk of losing benefits.

This is simply a tightening up of rules to ensure the system is not being abused. No-one likes being taken for a ride, but that is what is happening right now. The vast majority of EI contributors, who never receive benefits, are paying for the lifestyle of people who have no intention of finding work to bridge the gap between temporary or seasonal work.

Crab fishermen who make two trips to sea can earn enough insurable earnings to qualify for maximum EI benefits (55% of income) for the rest of the year. That is just not right.

The reforms will not cure a system that is bent out of shape, but it will more closely align work and rewards.

The real question is why the Conservatives didn’t just say all this in the first place? EI reforms were hinted at in the budget bill, where the issue of what constitutes “suitable employment” was raised.

Yet no details were available, putting MPs asked to sell the policy in an unenviable position. Kellie Leitch, the parliamentary secretary for human resources, was forced to admit on live television that “right now the policy is being developed … we have not come to a clear definition on what that [suitable employment] is.”

This is not the first time that a major policy shift has been announced without some fairly elementary details being figured out first. In January, the Prime Minister went to Davos, Switzerland, and told a high-powered business audience that he was planning to revamp Canada’s Old Age Security system. Yet the specification that it would not be introduced until a decade from now, or that it would not affect anyone over 54, was not revealed until the budget came out in late March.

In the interim, the opposition parties made hay. Judy Sgro, the Liberal seniors critic, said seniors would be forced to visit food banks and soup kitchens.

Similarly, in the absence of any EI plan, the NDP has suggested the Conservatives are proposing a “nanny state,” in which the unemployed will be forced to accept jobs for which they are over-qualified, or lose their benefits.

The responsibility for rolling out unmilled policy is said to be the Prime Minister’s alone. He pushed for the EI changes to be included in the budget bill and to announce the OAS changes in Davos. It suggests there is no-one in his inner circle who is challenging him and saying: “Prime Minister, this may not be a good idea.”

The rigid message discipline of recent years appears to have given way to a free-for-all, in which any minister passing a microphone can muse on the topic. The suggestion by Jim Flaherty that the “only bad job is not having a job” was particularly unhelpful in this regard.

The government was relying on receiving the benefit of the doubt from an increasingly skeptical public and the Finance Minister sounded like he was advocating that the unemployed get on their bikes and relocate.

Fortunately, the policy appears better thought out than the messaging and the opposition parties will have to move along and find something else on which to monger fear.

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